Recently I was looking at my old WoAP post and thinking about how the fundamentals of creating a good, solid-feeling weapon are evolving, and which basics are the same as they were 15 years ago.  Developers are definitely better at these things, but experiences are still all over the board.

I gathered more footage from games released in the last year in preparation of a WoAP section on this site (which is still locked for now), but I fell behind in capturing the newest of the new.  While that certainly won’t deter me, I did realize that I did have one source of state-of-the-art titles with readily-prepared footage…  E3 2010!  Sure the games are in-progress and the available footage varies in quality, but I thought it would be fun to see what the next year could be like in terms of nice, beefy implements of destruction.

As usual, I examined a number of elements to consider whether they contribute to a sense of power.  Check out the original article if you wonder, for example, why a real-world weapon still needs to follow these rules:

• Gun Visuals: The visual effect of the weapon’s muzzle flash and bullet trail, and the animation of the weapon itself firing. It’s the first thing people think of when they consider how the gun looks and feels.
• Sound Effects: How’s the audio, from the firing to the impact sounds?  This can be one of the hardest to get right, because the sound has to bear repetition thousands of times, and it has to compliment the rest of the arsenal.
• Effect on Environment: Here we look at the visual impact of the bullet on a wall or floor, as well as environmental shifts such as lighting. We need these because the results of stray bullets give the player a sense of affecting their environment and with a potent weapon.
• Effect on Opponent: This refers to the visual impact on an enemy, and how the enemy reacts to being shot, which is critical to give the player feedback that he is successfully damaging the foe.
• Combat Effectiveness: I’m completely subjective here, which can be unfair when taken out of context, but it’s worth talking about. If I see a weapon limply pile bullets into an enemy with little sense of accomplishment, that weapon doesn’t get high marks.  Maybe it’s designed to be a pathetic weapon, I don’t know.

Each weapon is grouped with its general type:  They aren’t all identical models, weights or even technology, but each group of weapons fills a general role for players.  I found as much unadulterated footage as I could…  nothing from trailers or anything less than the game being played.  This is obviously not final weaponry, and I had to make adjustments for the situations where the audio or visual quality wasn’t the best.  Suffice it to say, they previewed their games to us and basically I’m previewing the weapons right back.  Wah.

I didn’t get footage from everyone I wanted (technical issues denied me Brink and Killzone 3), but there was plenty of material (in unbiased alphabetical order of course):

• The Agency, Sony Online Entertainment
• Blacklight: Tango Down, Zombie
• Bodycount, Codemasters
• Breach, Atomic Games
• Bulletstorm, People Can Fly
• Call of Duty: Black Ops, Activision
• Crysis 2, Crytek
• Halo: Reach, Bungie
• Medal of Honor, Electronic Arts
• Rage, id Software
• Vanquish, SEGA

(Too many one-word titles that start with “B” this year…)

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Last week I got a nagging feeling that I needed to catch up on some of the latest games… I’d played and enjoyed Grand Theft Auto IV, as well as some other open-world and RPG titles, but occasionally there is a “huge” title that I just plain miss. This fall was a busy time…  while I’d played Bioshock and some (but not enough) of Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect, I’d completely breezed by Halo 3. As a long-time shooter fan/developer I figured I owed it to myself to put in a few hours and catch up with what’s held up as state-of-the-art.

As I played through the first few levels, I got reminded of weird thing that always bothered me with the Halo series. The weapon you start with, the Assault Rifle, always starts the game on the wrong foot for me.  It always felt anemic and ineffective against enemies, and the third installment wasn’t a whole lot better.  I have no doubt that some of this might be a design choice, since it would be foolish to give the player a powerful weapon at the start of the game.  Of course you need a lot of room for growth so that the player feels a sense of achievement as he/she finds new weaponry. However, for a weapon so obviously inspired by the Pulse Rifle from Aliens (one of the coolest movie guns ever), it’s always been tremendously disappointing to have my anticipation dashed…  The gun looked and sounded so subdued, and had little apparent effect on my opponents.

C’mon, watch this and tell me that you don’t want that rifle to be this badass sounding.

While I got past it and am now churning through Halo 3, the experience got me thinking about what elements make up a weapon that is satisfying to wield. Sure, making a weapon do more damage is what you’d expect, but there are a large number of intangibles that can add to the player’s shooter experience without disrupting the balance of the game.

Most of my roots are from Raven Software, where shooters are (mostly) a way of life. If there’s one thing that members of the studio preached constantly, most particularly my boss Brian Raffel, was that “the player must feel powerful”. It seems obvious, but a lot of times games don’t do enough to make the player feel like the gun in his/her hand is an unstoppable tool of destruction. This is about gratification and player expectation… Movies have trained audiences to expect that guns shoot massive plumes of flame and sparks and are accompanied by tremendous booming sound. In comparison, the sharp, loud crack or pop of a real gun can be a disappointment (although obviously they are intimidating nonetheless in person). Usually just modeling the audio and visual reality of a weapon isn’t quite enough.

Most games that have contemporary-style guns have a few standbys in their arsenal … the pistol, the machinegun or automatic rifle, and the shotgun. As an exercise, I cracked out a bunch of different first-person shooters and captured their weapons on video for the purposes of comparison. These games were:

• Halo 3 (Xbox 360, 2007)
• Resistance: Fall of Man (Playstation 3, 2006)
• Half Life 2 (PC, 2004)
• Quake 4 (PC, 2005)
• Doom (PC, 1993)
• Deus Ex (PC , 2000)
• Bioshock (Xbox 360, 2007)

In each, I took shots of the weapon firing at a surface, and follow with shooting at a “common” opponent. The choice of a “common” opponent is arbitrary (and sometimes driven by convenience when I was capturing footage), but suffice it to say that I wanted to choose an enemy that the player was going to face frequently with a given weapon. A few of these weapons also have “upgrades” that make them more effective, but I wanted to provide feedback on how the weapon would be seen upon first picking it up… will the player be glad he did? Will he or she keep using it because it’s just awesome? Read the rest of this entry »